Sunday, December 26, 2010

Pistachio Cocoa Spice Cake

Christmas Day is also a big birthday time around here, and a new cake is always dreamt up and requested by TCV. This year, the cake seemed like it would be pretty simple: it had to be not too sugary and pistachio-chocolate. Online, there are lots of pistachio cake recipes, but most are very, very disgusting. Call us uppity if you will, but we are not going to ask that anyone mess around with green food coloring or a box of yellow cake mix, so further research on pistachio cake was necessary.

This recipe was my starting point. I made it into a marble cake, a kind I hadn't thought about in a while. I used cocoa powder instead of flour to coat the buttered pan and chose some spices other than cardamom. Theo's gingerbread spiced holiday candy bar is something I've tried recently and liked a lot, so I used it for the cake's ganache glaze.

Pistachio Cocoa Spiced Cake

1 cup shelled pistachios

1 cup AP flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. each of clove powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice

1/4 tsp. sea salt

1/4 cup milk

1/4 cup plain yogurt or sour cream

1 tsp. vanilla paste

1 cup cane sugar

3/4 stick butter + 1/8 c soy marg

3 eggs

1/3 cup Dutch process cocoa powder

For preparing the bundt pan:

1 tbsp. butter

1/8 cup cocoa

Chocolate spice glaze:

1/2 of a gingersnap spice chocolate bar

1 tbsp. milk

(+ powdered sugar for dusting the cooled cake)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Blend the pistachios in your food processor. Add flour, baking powder, spices, and sea salt and pulse to combine. Set aside. Cream butter and sugar in a stand mixer. Next, whisk the milk, yogurt or sour cream, and vanilla. Now you have the three main parts of the recipe to combine. Start the mixer and add the dry ingredients to the creamed butter along with the milk mixture. Take out a cup of the cake batter and whisk in the cocoa powder.

Prepare your bundt pan or cake pan by buttering it and dusting it with cocoa. Pour in all of the pistachio batter and dot it with the cup of cocoa batter. Swirl a knife this way and that way through the cake batter to marble it. Bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees. Let it cool and gently remove it from the pan by turning it upside down onto a plate. Use a sifter to dust it with powdered sugar. Make your glaze by barely heating the chocolate bar and milk; let it cool a bit then use a spoon to drizzle it over the cake.